The Murder Room

“Jim, we’re not just solving a murder. Scott was cut short of his ability to rehabilitate himself and be honorable and productive. What we’re doing—part of the ethic of being a father—is to take up that challenge for him and make a strike for decency.”

“What do we do next?” Dunn’s eyes were fastened on the thin man.

“The Lubbock Police Department must call me and request my help. The Vidocq Society does not become involved in a case unless it is invited in with full cooperation by the police department. Until that happens, all we’ve done is have a conversation.”

“I’ll call them right away. They’ll understand,” Dunn said passionately. “They’ll have to.”

“Then it’s up to the police to call me,” Walter said, “or we have wasted our time. And another thing.”

Dunn appeared dazed. He was feeling relieved, emboldened, optimistic, and overwhelmed all at once.

The thin man’s face sharpened in the sallow light of the room.

“The Vidocq Society will help you as best we can. As for myself, I’m not going to let that bitch get away with murder.”

• CHAPTER 33 •

MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

The week before Christmas a little blond girl, dead for thirty years, materialized on a screen in the City Tavern. The tiny figure, bruised and beaten, ashen face drained of life, shimmered in the midday sunlight in the front of the room. Fleisher started trembling. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

That morning in the Strawbridge & Clothier department store, he’d seen Ebenezer Scrooge quaver before the Ghost of Christmas Past in the store’s annual portrayal of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. But the slain little girl before him now, nine-year-old Carol Ann Dougherty, was not a figment of anyone’s imagination, and Fleisher was not trembling in fear. He was shaking in fury.

Dougherty’s murder was one of the saddest and most disturbing images of his childhood. Carol Ann had been found raped and murdered in St. Mark’s Church in Bristol, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb not far from Fleisher’s house, in October 1962. A fifth-grader at the parish school, she had been killed in an era when police and the public were not fully aware of the perverse sexual needs of many priests, or the long practice in the Roman Catholic Church of allowing pedophile priests, cloaked wolves, to prey on victims, simply transferring them from flock to vulnerable flock. Carol’s killer had never been brought to justice.

Now on the morning of December 17, 1992, as the Vidocq Society began its examination of the Choir Loft Murder, Fleisher converted his anger into a desire to fix the past. Thirty years, one month, and twenty-five days after the murder, Bristol police chief Frank Peranteau and detective Randy Moore stood before the society to present the case. Peranteau had said, “We need all the help we can get.” A series of articles in the Bucks County Courier Times by reporter J. D. Mullane had recently reawakened interest in the county’s coldest case. The county district attorney had impaneled a grand jury to investigate it. Chief Peranteau had inherited the case from Chief Vincent Faragalli, retired now for thirteen years, who had obsessed over it. Faragalli kept Carol’s picture in his wallet.

The case was always “ just out of reach,” investigators said.

Now the screen in the Long Room showed Dougherty lying on her back in the choir loft the day she was raped and murdered. It was one of those cases where the waiters and waitresses looked away as they carried silver cloches in and out of the Murder Room.

Light from a stained-glass window revealed her blond hair mussed and untied. The red plastic barrette that had held it in a ponytail was lying nearby on the landing. One of her feet was bare. The shoe was tossed to the side; the sock was stuffed in her mouth, gagging her. Carol’s small right arm was wrenched behind her back. Her left hand was straight out, clutching three dark hairs, a man’s pubic hairs, which she had grabbed during her fatal struggle. She had been forcibly raped; semen was found at the scene. The grooves on her neck, from the rope that strangled her to death, appeared to match the pattern of a cincture, the long, ropelike cord tied around the waist of a priest’s alb, the full-length Roman tunic. To Roman Catholics, the cincture was a symbol of the priest’s chastity and purity.

One of the few surviving original investigators had told the Courier Times that it broke his heart. “I really took that case to heart because I had a daughter the same age, nine years old. You saw that little girl laying in that choir loft, and you just wanted to cry.”

Fleisher felt a chill displace his holiday cheer. As he walked the city garlanded in holiday lights that morning, Fleisher had allowed himself a moment of pride in the Vidocq Society. Vidocq agents were working for justice wherever need took them. Richard Walter was in West Texas that morning, consulting with police on the Dunn case. Fleisher smiled, imagining their sardonic dark knight flashing his rapier wit at the suspected killers of Scott Dunn, the police—whomever got in his way. U.S. Customs special agent Joe O’Kane, the Vidocq case manager, was fielding heaps of letters signed by grieving and aggrieved men and women across America. Word was out that a band of pro bono detectives in the City of Brotherly Love was standing for truth in cold murders beyond the grasp of police.

But now he noted that a quiet pall had fallen over his fellow Vidocqeans. “Everyone was deeply disturbed,” he recalled. Though Fleisher knew that one of the most notorious murders of his childhood was on the menu, he had not expected to be so deeply affected. Looking around at his seasoned investigators, he was confident they could help.

On Monday, October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy went on national TV to announce that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missile sites in Cuba, ninety miles from Florida. That afternoon after school, Carol rode her bicycle to the library to take back a book and meet two girlfriends. Police never learned why she stopped at the old stone church on the riverfront, but the nuns often said that if you were passing the church you should stop and say your prayers. Witnesses saw Carol enter the church at 4 P.M.

At five o’clock, when she didn’t return home for dinner, her parents went looking for her. Frank Dougherty, a newspaper printer, found his daughter’s bicycle on the steps of St. Mark’s, and went into the church looking for her. When he found his daughter’s body in the choir loft he ran out into the twilight screaming for help. As word spread, a thousand people gathered behind rope barricades outside the church, a fixture in the community since the nineteenth century. As the night went on and police and the coroner came and went through the arched entrance, they shouted and wept, stood numb and whispered, “A girl killed in a church!” and did not move, as if they would stand there until the world was made right again. After seven hours, Chief Vincent Faragalli told them to go home. “As of right now, we are without any leads.”

Faragalli learned that the parish housekeeper had seen someone kneeling in a pew a few minutes before Carol entered the church. He was eager to learn the identity of this “mystery witness,” but his attempts to extensively interview church staff were quashed by Monsignor Paul Baird, the leading cleric at St. Mark’s, who refused to let police interview the reverends Joseph Sabadish or Michael Carroll.

But police had already interviewed Father Sabadish once before. Monsignor Baird withdrew cooperation, and now they began to focus the investigation on Sabadish. Sabadish had been extremely nervous and evasive during the interview. He gave an alibi that police easily discredited. The priest said he had been a few blocks from the church on West Circle, making his rounds on the annual parish visitation, during the time of the murder. But the surviving investigator interviewed by reporter Mullane said that Sabadish had lied.

“He left a note at one of the houses that showed he was on West Circle a couple of hours before the murder,” the investigator said.

In 1962, a clerk at a Bristol shoe store told the police that Sabadish came into the shop shortly before 4:30 that afternoon—when Carol was apparently already dead—acting strangely. Nervous and distracted, he asked the clerk for the time, and also asked a bizarre question in a shoe store, “Do you sell underwear?” The clerk noted that Sabadish was wearing a wristwatch and knew the time. Police believed Sabadish was trying to create an alibi for himself. And they became increasingly suspicious of the priest’s possible sexual perversions when they obtained receipts for purchases he had made at an upscale ladies’ lingerie shop.

They were still looking at other possible suspects. But the night before Halloween, a week into the investigation, Chief Faragalli received disturbing information that made Sabadish the primary suspect. A married woman in nearby Fairless Hills told police that Sabadish had threatened to rape her three or four weeks before